The Sonic Fugu or Judas in Blue Jeans

The air in the Grand Indigo Hall didn’t just vibrate; it shimmered with the scent of wet ash and stale champagne. This was the premiere of Boy Gorgeous’s masterwork, “The Anatomy of an Impulse,” and the stakes were higher than the building's vaulted ceiling.

​Boy Gorgeous stood backstage, nursing a drink that tasted like bright violet trapezoids. To anyone else, he looked pristine in a suit of raw, screaming silk. But internally, he was a mêlée. He lived the life the Symbolists dreamed of, a constant, unwanted, yet exhilarating planned disordering of the senses. He didn’t need mescaline; he was born inside a hallucinogenic perfumery and never escaped.

​“Ten minutes, Gorgeous,” the stage manager said. The words fell on his skin like sour-smelling hailstones.

​He peeped through the velvet curtain. In the center box sat Angela Dust, the world's most formidable critic. To Angela, the world was a collection of rigorous categories, neatly sorted and filed away. Synesthesia wasn't an artistic grace; it was a sloppy neurological glitch, a "small plague" that distracted from the purity of form. Her critique was a creamy blur of succulent gray sound that smelled like week-old strawberries dropped onto a tin sieve. She was determined to tarnish his shine with the grim polish of "common sense."

​Boy Gorgeous knew that for Angela, hearing was a solitary act. For him, music was a synthesis—symballein, a throwing together of the universe. He intended to prove that "more is more."

​He walked onto the stage. The applause tasted like warm butterscotch in his mouth. He did not bow; he offered himself to the waves of sight and touch that rolled over him. He pulsed with natural pheromones, a biological allure that bridged the gap between species.

​He sat at the massive pipe organ. For Angela, he knew, A-major was just a key signature, a structural tool. He knew that for Rimsky-Korsakov, it was rosy, and for Scriabin, it was green. But for Boy Gorgeous, it was both: the heat of a rosy sun hitting the vibrant scent of fresh-cut green grass.

​He struck the first chord.

​It was C-Major, but not just the white key. It was a blinding, pure-white light that turned to a bleeding, Scriabin-red around the edges as he held the note. It smelled like thick golden butterscotch and sounded like mother’s approaching chatter.

​He watched Angela in the box. She stiffened. She was hearing music, yes, but she was also feeling a tactile, painful delight upon her skin, an onslaught of perceptions she couldn't categorize. She was trying to tame it, but it was too fast, too furious.

​He pressed into the movement. He wasn’t just composing; he was researching the "sadistic cuisine" of sound, forcing the audience to swallow textures they didn't know could be eaten. He translated a perfume he’d smelled in an ancient, forgotten alleyway into a dissonant visual vision of deep violet that spurts from the speakers. He was theOne hidden behind the Many.

​His fingers flew. He wanted to probe the mysteries. Why does music move us? He gave them the answer not in theory, but in a physical deluge. It moved them because it touched them, literally. A base note was a low sound with a dark color that felt like the rough texture of an iceberg. A high notes was a bright color that felt like kissing on the mouth.

​He pushed the audience toward that boundary where newborns ride on intermingling waves. He wanted them to forget the common sense that forces a cozy blur into rigid silos. He wanted them to taste baked beans when they heard the word “Anger.”

​As the piece reached its crescendo, he threw it all together. Every vowel was colored (Rimbaud’s black-corset 'A'), every note was a thick garment woven thread by overlapping thread. He was a living cognitive fossil, unleashing the primitive power of the limbic system through the sophisticated machinery of a pipe organ.

​He struck the final chord in D-Major. It was a wash of pure, sapphire blue that tasted like ripe blueberries on a matte surface.

​Silence in theindigo hall. Then, a roar.

​Boy Gorgeous stood, bathed in the blinding yellow light of the spotlights, which felt to him like smooth, hot sand. He looked at Angela Dust. Her face was pale, her mouth slightly agape. She hadn't just listened to a concert. She had been touched, tasted, smelled, and seen by a sound she couldn’t categorize. He hadn't just composed music; he had created a moment where the One was revealed, and for the first time in her life, the many categories of Angela Dust were woven together. He hadn't won a debate; he had triggered a memory of how mammals used to see the world, before words tamed the chaos. And that was the most alluring smell of all.

The applause eventually died the way a cheap cigar burns out—slow, bitter, and leaving a film on the teeth.

​Boy Gorgeous didn’t stick around for the handshakes. He retreated to dressing room four, a concrete bunker vibrating with the low, thundercloud-gray hum of the building's HVAC system. He locked the door, stripped off the screaming silk suit, and stood naked in the center of the room. He didn’t write in the nude like Hugo or climb mulberry trees like Lawrence, but he needed the raw air on his skin to stop the lingering friction of the music.

​His head was a charnel house of fading echoes. The synesthetic hangover was always brutal. The blue of that final D-Major chord was still staining the edges of his vision, tasting faintly of ozone and exhaustion.

​He walked over to the vanity, bypassed the champagne, and opened the bottom drawer. Inside sat four rotting Gala apples. They were bruised, brown, and weeping juice into a folded towel. Schiller’s trick. He leaned in and inhaled deeply. The sweet, rancid mustiness hit the back of his throat. It was a single, ugly, uncomplicated sensation. It didn't look like a color. It didn't sound like a bell. It was just rot, and it anchored him back to the physical world, dropping his blood pressure like a stone.

​He was just reaching for a towel when the lock on the door clicked.

​It didn't rattle. It just turned, smoothly picked and bypassed.

​The door swung inward. Angela Dust stood in the frame. She had lost the rigid posture of the center box. Her hair, usually lacquered into a defensive helmet, was slightly feral. She stepped inside and closed the door behind her, locking it again.

​"You don't knock," Boy said, tossing the towel over his shoulder.

​"And you don't play by the rules," Angela replied.

​Her voice was different. Usually, her words hit him as precise, rigorous categories—neat little squares of sound. Now, her syllables were bleeding. When she spoke the hard g in 'rules,' it tasted exactly like vulcanized rubber. The r was a sooty rag being violently ripped in half.

​"The concert is over, Angela. If you want to write a panning review, do it from a desk."

​"I’m not here to review you, Gorgeous." She walked slowly toward him, her eyes flicking to the open drawer with the rotting fruit. A ghost of a smile touched her lips. "I see you're doing the hard gardening. Courting the muse. Schiller's apples? Cute. Tell me, do you ever lie in a coffin like Sitwell? Or do you just bury yourself in the noise?"

​Boy didn't move. The air in the room suddenly felt heavy, thick with the sharp, huckleberry-blue scent of adrenaline. "What do you want?"

​"For thirty years, I've kept the world in boxes," Angela said, her voice dropping to a whisper that felt like coarse sandpaper on his forearms. "I built solid walls to keep out the leaking and the drafts. Common sense. Order. And then you play a single chord, and suddenly I’m tasting my own pulse and seeing the color of my own panic."

​She stopped three feet away. She didn't look like a critic anymore. She looked like an addict who had just discovered the poppy field.

​"You didn't just compose a piece of music," she said. "You mapped the limbic system. You found the shortcut past the cortex, right down to the primitive mammalian brain."

​"It's called art, Angela."

​"Don't give me that romantic garbage," she snapped. "Art is a painting on a wall. This is a skeleton key. And you and I both know there are people in this city who pay very good money for keys."

​Boy felt a cold prickle of sweat run down his spine. The scent of the room shifted from rotting apples to the metallic tang of old blood.

"I'm a musician. Not a contractor."

​Angela reached into her tailored coat. Boy tensed, expecting a gun. Instead, she pulled out a tuning fork. It wasn't standard steel. It was heavy, matte-black, and etched with symbols that made Boy's vision swim with nausea.

​"I don't work for the papers anymore, Gorgeous. I haven't for a long time," she said softly. She tapped the heavy fork against the edge of the vanity.

​It didn't ring. It pulled. It sucked the sound out of the room, emitting a frequency so low it bypassed Boy's ears and vibrated directly in his teeth. It tasted like ash. It felt like drowning.

​"The people I represent want the perfect word, Gorgeous. The glorious phrase that makes the exquisite avalanche of consciousness completely, totally manageable," Angela said, stepping closer. "And you're going to help us write it. Or I promise you, I will make sure you never hear another color for the rest of your short life."

The void of the tuning fork was a terrifying, suffocating beige. Not a color, but the sheer, horrifying absence of it. A flatlining of the soul. It tasted like chewing on a wad of aluminum foil.

​"Stop it," Boy gasped. The words felt like spitting out dry oatmeal.

​"Just a taste of the quiet," Angela said, her eyes dead and dark.

​Then, the heavy deadbolt clicked. Not picked this time. A master key.

​Lights, camera, action. As the door swung open, the harsh fluorescent vanity bulbs flickered on a motion sensor, casting a sickly, green-yellow pallor over the concrete bunker.

​Julian stepped inside.

​Julian of the silver-moon complexion. Julian, Boy’s anchor, whose laugh usually tasted like crushed ice and expensive gin. Today, he was just a guy in a faded denim jacket and ripped Levi’s. A Judas in blue jeans.

​He didn't look at Boy, who was still standing naked and shivering against the cinderblock. He looked straight at Angela.

​"Is he handled?" Julian asked. His voice didn't have its usual shimmering resonance. It sounded flat. Tinny. Cheap.

​Boy pressed his spine against the cold wall. "Jules? What the hell is this?"

​Julian finally turned. Under the brutal, unforgiving vanity lights, Boy saw the sloppy, unblended line of foundation along Julian's jaw—the cheap, drugstore makeup he always used to cover up his late-night bruising. There was such a fragile, heartbreaking beauty in that cheapness, a tragic collision of dollar-store vanity and raw, undeniable physical grace. Boy had loved him for it. He had tasted vintage champagne every time he kissed that chalky powder.

​Now, he just tasted copper and ash.

​"I'm sorry, Gorgeous," Julian said, slipping a hand into his denim pocket. He shifted his weight, refusing to meet Boy's eyes. "But you know how much I hate the noise. I can't live inside your head anymore. And they... they promised a way out."

​Angela smiled, a thin, cruel slit of a thing. She pressed her thumb against the tines of the tuning fork, silencing it. Instantly, the sensory world rushed back in—the hum of the HVAC (thundercloud-gray), the smell of the rotting apples (rancid, heavy gold), the sting of the cold air on Boy's bare skin.

​"Julian is a practical creature," Angela purred, stepping back so the two lovers were face to face. "He understands that living inside a perpetual symphony is exhausting. He just wanted a little peace, a little quiet. And a very, very large check."

​Boy looked at the man he loved. The ultimate betrayal wasn't a knife in the back; it was a transaction. It was selling out the exquisite, chaotic avalanche of consciousness for a quiet room and a payout.

​"You sold me to a critic," Boy whispered. The heartache didn't have a color. It was just a heavy, physical crushing sensation in his chest, a lead weight pulling him down toward the scuffed linoleum.

​"It's just the industry, baby," Julian said, though his voice cracked—a tiny, jagged splinter of purple sound. "You're a star. You'll adapt. Put on the screaming silk. Smile for the cameras. They just want you to write a frequency that makes people feel... compliant. Just a little subliminal peace. You can do that in your sleep."

​"And if I say no?"

​Julian pulled something from his denim pocket. Not a gun. A sleek, heavy auto-injector. "Then we do it the hard way. A little chemical dampener. Just enough to blur the edges of your synesthesia. To turn that beautiful, blinding C-Major into a nice, manageable gray."

​It was the ultimate tragedy of the theater. The makeup, the blinding lights, the sheer, staggering beauty of the performance—all of it undercut by the sheer, staggering cheapness of the people pulling the strings.

​The walls are closing in, and the betrayal is fresh.

​Deep down, they all knew it. The commuters, the coupon-clippers, the mid-level managers with their sensible shoes and their bran-muffin mornings—they were all just shackled in this dreary, loveless, twin-bed marriage of convenience to Reality. It was a lease with a terrible APR. A compromise. And they left the heavy lifting, the dirty, howling, technicolor heavy lifting of actual, raw existence to the seers, the shamans, the ascetics, the religious teachers, the artists. To guys like Boy Gorgeous.

​Boy stood there, naked as a plucked chicken under the humming fluorescent halogens, his skin still vibrating in B-flat minor, looking at Julian in his Judas denim. Julian, who wanted out of the marriage. Julian, who wanted the divorce settlement.

​"Glitter-dust will send them tomorrow morning," Angela said, her voice a filing-cabinet slam of sensible beige. "The engineers. The men with the contracts and the soundproof foams. You're going to give them the fugu, Gorgeous, but you're going to fillet the poison right out of it. A nice, safe, digestible tilapia of the soul."

​"You think you can just cap the volcano, Jules?" Boy said, ignoring Angela, pitching straight to his lover, his voice rising, gathering that Elkin-esque momentum, a peddler of the sublime hawking the ineffable out of a busted suitcase. "You think you can take the raw, bleeding, unanalyzed dream-stuff that pours out of the primordial cosmic faucet and bottle it for the dentists? For the actuaries?"

​The Shaman's Pitch

​Julian gripped the auto-injector, his knuckles white, the cheap drugstore foundation cracking along his jawline like a dry riverbed. "I just want to sleep, Boy. I just want to hear a C-chord and not taste copper and regret! I want a chair to just be a chair, not a symphony of screaming mahogany!"

​"But the chair is screaming, Julian!" Boy threw his arms wide, a ridiculous, pale, glorious prophet in a concrete bunker smelling of rotten apples and betrayal. "That’s the gig! We are the designated drivers of the human condition! We take the drugs, we go to the circuses, we tramp through the jungles of our own busted limbic systems so these—these pedestrians don't have to! We risk our lives to sample the new taste! You want to domesticate the myth? You want to put a muzzle on the world of dreams?"

​Boy took a step forward. He didn't cover himself. He let them see every shivering, goosebumped inch of the shaman.

​"They want the high without the hangover," Boy sneered, turning his eyes to Angela, who was clutching her matte-black tuning fork like a rosary. "They want the infinite world of delight, but they want it with a money-back guarantee and a low-sodium warning. And you, Angela? You're just the middle-management of the apocalypse. You’re HR for the human soul."

​He reached past Julian, his hand moving so fast it left a violent, saffron-yellow streak in his own vision. He didn't grab the gun. He didn't grab the tuning fork. He reached into the open vanity drawer and grabbed one of Schiller’s rotting, bruised Gala apples.

​He held it up. It smelled of cider, of death, of the hard gardening of the muse.

​"Glitter-dust sends them tomorrow morning," Boy whispered, the manic energy suddenly dropping into a chilling, perfectly sane register. "Fine. But I don't need the needle, Jules. I don't need the chemical dampener."

​Boy brought the rotting apple to his mouth and took a massive, wet, crunching bite of the garbage fruit. The juice ran down his chin. The taste was a hideous, muddy, kzspygu-rainbow of decay. It anchored him. It dropped his blood pressure, displaced his weight, sent the screaming silk of his synesthesia into a sudden, terrifying, localized remission.

​He chewed, swallowed, and smiled with brown-stained teeth.

​"You want a marriage of convenience?" Boy said, the whites of his eyes gleaming. "I'll give them the fugu tomorrow morning. But I'm the chef, Angela. I decide what part of the fish they eat."

​He's bitten the apple and made his counter-offer

​Boy Gorgeous forced the masticated pulp of the rotting Gala apple down his throat. It hit his stomach like a lead weight, a dirty, grounding anchor in the shimmering, hysterical sea of his own biology. He spat a single, black seed onto the scuffed linoleum. It sounded, to him, like a gavel dropping in an empty cathedral.

​"You want the divorce, Jules?" Boy’s voice was suddenly terrifyingly resonant, stripping away the manic pitch and dropping into a subterranean baritone that vibrated the cheap mirrors. "You want out of the genetic chain? You want to sever the big, glorious, vibrating umbilical cord that connects us to the dirt, to the dogs, to William Blake and the pterodactyls?"

​Julian flinched, the auto-injector trembling in his hand. The cheap foundation on his jaw looked suddenly, tragically absurd under the halogens, like a clown caught in a police spotlight.

​"Boy, please—"

​"Don't 'Boy' me! I am the Earth’s dream, Julian!" Boy stepped forward, the sheer, unadulterated radioactive force of his heartbreak going completely nuclear. It was a meltdown of every shared lease, every split diner check, every whispered, technicolor sweet-nothing in the dark. It was a Soupocalypse of the soul.

​He cornered Julian against the vanity, throwing his arms wide, a naked, sticky, apple-scented ascetic screaming from the mountaintop of dressing room four.

​"Do you even know what happens when you close your eyes, you beautiful, pedestrian traitor?" Boy bellowed, his voice bouncing off the soundproof foam. "Eight to thirteen hertz! That’s the frequency of your REM sleep, Jules! And do you know what the planet does? The tremulous, quivering, spinning rock we are standing on? It vibrates at ten hertz! Ten! When we sleep, we enter synchrony with the tectonic plates! We become the Earth dreaming itself! And you want to trade that... that communion... for what? A 401k? A quiet room where a table is just a piece of dead wood?"

​Angela Dust took a step back, her rigid posture faltering. The sheer emotional radiation coming off Boy was defying her categories. It wasn't just a sound; it was a physical pressure, a localized weather event of pure, unadulterated grief and cosmic defiance.

​"I can't take the noise!" Julian shouted back, a desperate, tear-choked plea. "I'm not a shaman! I'm just a guy! I want to look at a flower and just see a damn flower, Boy! I don't want to hear it screaming its photosynthesis in D-minor!"

​"Then you are dead!" Boy roared, slamming his hand on the counter, rattling the champagne flutes. "You are functionally, spiritually deceased! The senses aren't a parlor trick, Julian, they're the bridge! They're the only thing getting our private, lonely, pathetic little souls out of solitary confinement and into the universe! You think that chemical dampener is a cure? It's a lobotomy! You're assassinating the universe just so you can get a good night's sleep!"

​Julian was weeping now, ugly, jagged tears that washed away the cheap makeup, revealing the bruises beneath—the exhaustion of living too close to the sun. He dropped the auto-injector. It clattered against the floor, rolling to stop against Boy’s bare foot.

​Boy looked down at it, then back up at the man who had been his muse, his moon, his silvery anchor. The rage suddenly evaporated, leaving behind a cold, desolate crater.

​"You were the one thing that made the noise bearable," Boy whispered, the synesthesia creeping back in—Julian's tears tasted like cold saltwater and rusted iron. "But you're right. You're not a quester. You're just a tourist on the windswept perimeter. And the vacation's over."

​Boy kicked the auto-injector toward Angela. It spun across the floor and hit the toe of her sensible, leather shoe.

​"Pick it up, HR," Boy said, his eyes dead and focused. He didn't look at Julian again. "Tell the syndicate they don't need the needle. Tell Glitter-dust to send the engineers, the executives, the men with the checks, tomorrow morning. I'll play their game. I'll give them their fugu."

​He picked up the screaming silk suit from the chair and began, slowly, to dress.

​"But you tell them to bring a bib," Boy said, pulling the jacket over his shoulders, adjusting the lapels as the Grand Indigo Hall's HVAC hummed its thundercloud-gray behind him. "Because the chef is serving something off-menu."

​The radioactive dust has settled in the dressing room, and the battle lines are drawn for the morning.

The next morning, the Glitter-dust syndicate did not arrive with instruments of torture. They arrived with clipboards, soundproof acoustic paneling, and the quiet, terrifying arrogance of people who believe they can buy the infinite and sell it in a blister pack.

​The studio was a sterile, white-walled vacuum on the forty-fourth floor, designed to kill echoes and suffocate inspiration. It was the architectural embodiment of a flat and unyielding emotional terrain. A life with only a length, devoid of valleys, pinnacles, or detours.

​Boy Gorgeous sat at the center of the room behind a matte-black grand piano. He wore no screaming silk today, just a simple white shirt, his sleeves rolled up, his posture relaxed. He looked like a man who had already won.

​Angela Dust stood behind the glass of the control room, flanked by three men in bespoke charcoal suits. They were the architects of the mundane, men who demanded that the universe remain entirely scrutable and heavily insured.

​"Track one, Mr. Gorgeous," the lead executive's voice buzzed through the intercom, sounding like a dry cracker snapping in half. "Give us the baseline. Nice, manageable, and grounded. No color. No fugu."

​Boy placed his hands on the keys. He didn't look at the control room. He looked down at the ivory, closed his eyes, and thought of the savage and beautiful country that lay between the mystery of birth and the mystery of death.

​He didn't fight them with noise. He fought them with the one thing their rigorous, routinely analyzing senses could not compartmentalize: Wonder.

​The Chef’s Tasting Menu

​The Appetizer (The Flatline): Boy struck a simple, repetitive C-major progression. It was exactly what they asked for—a docile, domesticated tilapia of a tune. It was a marriage of convenience in sonic form. In the control room, the executives nodded, checking boxes on their clipboards. Angela exhaled, the tension leaving her shoulders. They thought they had him.

​The Puffer Fish (The Thoroughbred): Without changing the tempo, Boy shifted the underlying chord structure. He didn't make it dissonant; he made it vast. He introduced a syncopated, galloping rhythm in the left hand. It was the sound of Robert Louis Stevenson packing a bag just to move. It was the thrumming, muscular heartbeat of a high-spirited thoroughbred cresting a sun-struck hill. The sterile white room didn't just fill with sound; it began to expand.

​The Poison (The Mystery): Then, Boy Gorgeous unleashed the fugu. He flooded the room with uncertainty. He played notes that didn't resolve, suspending the chords over the acoustic vacuum like tightropes. He played the terrifying, exhilarating realization that the universe is inscrutable. He translated the taste of a rotting apple, the sting of Julian's tears, and the ten-hertz trembling of the Earth's dream into a cascade of cascading arpeggios.

​The executives dropped their clipboards.

​Through the glass, Boy watched the color drain from their charcoal-suited lives. They were experiencing it. The synesthetic bleed. The music wasn't just in their ears; it was suddenly in their blood, on their tongues, vibrating in the marrow of their bones. The flat, unyielding terrain of their reality was suddenly cracking open, revealing the magnificent, terrifying geography beneath.

​One executive clutched his chest, weeping openly, his meticulously groomed curiosity violently waking up after decades of hibernation. Another fell to his knees, his hands pressed against the glass, desperate to get closer to the raw experience of nature pouring out of the piano. They were tasting the fugu, and the poison was the agonizing, beautiful realization of exactly how much of the world they had been missing.

​Angela Dust stumbled backward, her hand flying to her mouth. She tasted the blinding, electric-blue flavor of absolute awe.

​Boy hit the final chord—a massive, unresolved, echoing question mark of a sound that hung in the air, refusing to be categorized, refusing to be filed away.

​It began in mystery, and as the final note slowly decayed into the absolute silence of the forty-fourth floor, it ended in mystery.

​Boy stood up from the piano bench, leaving the executives trapped in their newly awakened, hypersensitive bodies. He walked toward the studio door, pulling his jacket over his shoulder. He didn't need to ask for a contract. He had just burned their entire business model to the ground with a single, magnificent dose of the unknown.

​The syndicate has been shattered by the sheer force of the sublime.

EPILOGU

E

Boy Gorgeous crossed the water that very night. He only brought what he could carry: a single suitcase, the bruised memory of Julian’s face, and a sensory radar-net that hummed with the ten-hertz vibration of a shattered world.

​He told himself it was just a layover. Just for a couple of years, he murmured to the peeling wallpaper of a third-floor walk-up in a city where the rain always tasted like dull, oxidized pennies. We’re here for the time being. I answer to the query of the landlord, the grocer, the neighbors who hear the strange, unearthly music leaking beneath my door.

​But, in a rhythm that feels like a slow, inevitable heartbeat: Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

​Twelve years later, the Grand Indigo Hall is a ghost story, and the Glitter-dust syndicate is a fractured memory of charcoal suits and acoustic foam. Boy Gorgeous lives in the exquisite, aching architecture of the proσωρινό—the temporary.

​He dines sitting on a metal folding chair. It was cheap, bright yellow, and cheery when he bought it, though to him, the squeak of its hinges sounds like a sharp, metallic lime green.

The window pane in the kitchen is still taped where a winter storm cracked it. The television sits in the corner, still out of whack, broadcasting a fuzzy, white static that Boy occasionally uses to clear his auditory palate, like sniffing coffee beans at a perfume counter.

​There are cardboard boxes in the corner of the bedroom that he never did unpack. They hold the screaming silk suits. They hold the bones he stashed in the closet when he didn’t have the time, or the heart, to bury them.

​He left his "wedding china" behind. He left the grand stages, the velvet boxes, the screaming fans, and he left Julian. He left it all because he was terrified that under the immense, crushing weight of the real, unbridled universe, it might finally crack. So, he eats off the ordinary now.

Thick, heavy, diner-style ceramic plates that thud against the table with a reassuring, unpretentious brown thud.

​Sometimes, when the barometric pressure drops and the apartment fills with the gray light of late afternoon, Boy finds himself feeling weepy. The synesthesia flares up, uninvited. The memory of Julian’s cheap drugstore makeup and silver-moon complexion drifts into the room. And Boy realizes the profound, terrible theory hidden in his own neurology: nostalgia and tear gas have the exact same acrid smack. They both burn the back of the throat. They both make your eyes water. They both blind you to the present moment.

​He no longer serves the fugu to the masses. He doesn't play the pipe organ or the grand piano. Instead, he sits at a cheap, second-hand electric keyboard held up by an X-stand. It is a wildly temporary setup.

​He presses a single key. A C-major.

​It doesn't fill the room with blinding white light anymore. It’s softer now. Worn at the edges. A weathered wood, a polished ebony. It is the sound of a man who traveled the windswept perimeter of consciousness and decided to set up a small, quiet camp right on the edge.

​We're here for the time being, he thinks, playing a slow, descending scale that tastes faintly of spiced apples and survival. But nothing is more permanent than the temporary. ***